Control

One of the lessons I learned well in my elementary student teaching was that you HAD to maintain a fairly strong degree of control over the different variables in your lesson. If you don't want to end up with a big, mushy mess, don't hand out everything at once. Dole it out, one grain of rice at a time. So there's not a lot of touchy-feely, artsy-fartsy, experimentation to my lessons. Not that I think experimentation is a bad thing; I just haven't figured out how to put it in a box and keep it manageable.

On that note, I think we began our actual gluing of the mosaics very smoothly. We planned them from the outside in...we are now constructing them from the inside out. First we drew crossing lines from corner to corner to corner to use as a guide. I had them do four squares at a time (they finished 8 - these short periods are kind of killing me, but having doubles for year two this week will be nice!), the center four, and then the four above. It was simple enough for them to do on their own, but at the same time I wasn't hovering over them, doing it for them. So I was pretty happy with how the lesson went.

Keeping control behaviorally, however, is something that I'm still struggling with. It's tempting to chalk it up to my personality, that I prefer to maintain a friendly, fun atmosphere in my class, but I can honestly say that, actually, it's because I'm a little on the lazy side. Being a disciplinarian takes some work, some organization, and usually I'd rather get caught up in the moments of teaching. Even though yes, I know that they go hand in hand...you can't be a good educator unless you are a good disciplinarian. And that's why I keep trying. My new strategy: the Pirate's Treasure game. I've been teaching long enough to have lost the illusion that rewarding good behavior is bad. We all do it, get over it. Since school began I gave each table a color (and even folded an origami boat to hang over them), and awarded or erased stars depending on their behavior. But I'm not satisfied that it's enough - there has to be a point to it, and now there is. I've put a strip of paper above my whiteboard, and made little boats to placky-tack their way along the line. Only the table that gets the most stars that period gets to move a space. Whichever table gets to the treasure chest at the end of the line first, wins whatever is inside - probably a little sweet, an ice cream treat or a small chocolate or something. It's already had a marked impact on their behavior, and fifty dirhams worth of ice cream or whatever it costs me is well-worth a little sanity.